‘The Daily You’ from Pegasus News

Mike Orren, President of Pegasus News, sent me a release that went out today announcing the launch of “The Daily You,” a personalized news service for readers:

Today Pegasus News launched The Daily You™, an individually customized version of its local and neighborhood news and information service. This free service allows Pegasus News’ registered users to read about and comment on local news and events that are specifically tailored to their interests.

“From the day we started planning Pegasus News, we knew we wanted to create an environment where you can get news from your kid’s school in the same context as your NBA scores and where you can easily find a local singer-songwriter without having to dig past a touring band of a genre to which you’ve never listened,” said Pegasus News president and co-founder Mike Orren.

The idea is to mix customization with general news and information and then serve highly targeted ads against the personalized content.

This is one version of the concept of personalized news that was floated in the early days of the Internet. The other version is, of course, RSS and news readers. However, those disaggregate and reassemble content from third party sources. Pegasus News personalization exists within a controlled environment that makes monetizing and “behaviorally targeting” the content somewhat easier than in RSS.

However, the challenge is getting people to actually customize their content.

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Mike Orren below corrects me and notes, “Readers do not have to configure anything to make it work.” That’s smart Mike.

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This entry was posted on February 15, 2007 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Local Search, Newspapers, Personalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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3 Responses to “‘The Daily You’ from Pegasus News”

Thanks for the mention, Greg. But one thing I think you missed in our release:

“Readers do not have to configure anything to make it work.”

All we have to get is a registration so that a user account is formed. From there on out, we do it all.

We think this is critical for a couple reasons. One is that adoption on filling out profiles is low. The others are covered in our FAQ:

Can I edit my profile? Can I speed things up by explicitly telling you what I’m into?

For now, no. Here’s why: First of all, not everyone describes everything the same way. And without some sort of structure, we can’t figure out what you’re reading about. So, while we try to make our tags simple and understandable, we know exactly what we mean by them. More importantly, we know how the scoring works — and it’s complicated. A user might interpret that structure differently, and pick tags that don’t mean to her what they mean to us. And because interest isn’t binary — there are many things you like, but you may like some more than others — we haven’t been able to come up with a method for you to scale your likes and dislikes that works better than following actual clicks.

Second, and more importantly, actions speak louder than words. We’ve found, and seen evidence in research done by others, that we humans don’t always see ourselves with 20/20 vision. In filling out a survey, you might say you love ballet and champagne — and you might believe that. But you’re then just as likely to go catch a punk band and drink cheap beer. The Daily You™’s results are better when they aren’t filtered with these kind of perceptions. We’re not saying that we’re never going to let users edit Daily You™ profiles. But we won’t anytime soon.

[…] which is based in Dallas, TX, as something of a model for a local network of sites that deliver a broad yet personalized (with ad targeting) local experience. I’ve written a bit about Pegasus News in the […]